Ask me about Twilight and you'll hear a thirty minute long rant about how it's the worst thing that has EVER happened to publishing, movies, vampires, goth culture and geekdom in general.
The degree to which I loathe the phenomenon has literally no limits. I'd sit down and watch the Notebook and read the entire Shopaholic series until the end of time before even considering reading or watching Twilight again....
Some of my friends have commented that the Twilight series may suck alot of the cool factor out of traditional horror. BUT I SAY NAY! The vampire has a long and proud history, and today we celebrate that heritage!
10) MORBIUS!
Marvel comics tragic villain turned hero, Michael Morbius was a brillaint doctor struck down with a terminal blood ailment. When he turned to experimental treatments, he accidently transformed himself into a Living Vampire. He's fought Spiderman and Blade, joined the Midnight Sons and even briefly got his own comic book. Will there be a movie in Morbius's future? One can only hope!
9) BLADE!
Keeping with Marvel Comics, the Blade comic book character spawned two decent movies, one terrible one, and a brief tv series. The story itself is pretty basic: half vampire, half human who hunts his own kind, but Guillermo Deltoro's Blade 2 with the inclusion of the Reapers, coupled with some great fight scenes, definetly ramped up the cool factor....
8) CASTLEVANIA!
Grab your whip and holy water and celebrate one of the original great video game franchises! In fact with so many sequels, it begs the question: how many castles in Transylvania have vampires in them anyway?
8) 30 DAYS OF NIGHT!
What a brilliant concept: vampires in the arctic, where the sun doesn't shine for weeks at a time. However, the real genius of 30 Days of Night were the vampires themselves: stripped of their humanity by their obsessive thirst, they become little more than sadistic pack animals who delight in the sport of taunting and killing their prey.
7) FROM DUSK TILL DAWN!
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's movie starts off as a simple getaway film, then for absolutely no reason three quarters of the way though, VAMPIRES VAMPIRES VAMPIRES! With the campy feel of a Peter Jackson zombie movie like Dead Alive or Brain Dead, From Dusk 'till Dawn has to be watched if just for the scene of George Clooney slaughtering vampires with a stake attached to the end of a jackhammer.
6) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER!
For a brief period in the 1990's Joss Whedon had created the best thing on television. Unlike other teen dramas, the show didn't patronize it's audience or question their intelligence. The performances were excellent, the plots tackled real issues, and the writing had the sort of quick-wit and pithy exchanges that would come to define all of Joss Whedon's projects. Plus it had a Alyson Hannigan and Sarah Michelle Gellar, which is really all the excuse I needed to watch....
5) LET THE RIGHT ONE IN!
Sweden is not typically know for it's vampire movies, but they may have started a trend with Let the Right One In! Elevating the vampire movie to a position or high art and taking the concept of the undead romance to new and disturbing places, Let the Right One In tells the story of a preubescent boy and his emerging romance with the new "strange" girl next door is at once enchanting and horrifying. See the original before the Hollywood remake comes out next year and pretty much ruins the whole thing.
4) SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE!
A brilliant meta-movie with a genius twist, Shadow of the Vampire tells the story of the shooting of Nosferatu by F.W. Moreau in 1921. Considered one of the finest horror movies ever made and a classic of the silent era, Nosferatu was the first vampire movie. The movie's star, Max Shreck, was famous for doing all of his own make-up and staying in character through the whole shoot. Shadow of the Vampire postulates that the movie was so realistic because Max Shreck really was a vampire. The performance by John Malkovich is top rate but it's really Willem Dafoe's inhuman performance as a monstrous but at the same time comical Shreck that steals the movie....
3) ANNE RICE'S VAMPIRE CHRONICLES!
Before going all Jesus freak on us, Anne Rice did create one of the best vampire epics ever put on paper. Her version of the sexy, self-loathing vampire was the proto-type for the Twilight series, but it is in the creation of the amoral Bon Vivant Lestat that she had her true stroke of genius. It proves once and for all that vampires are really the most fun when they're evil. The best book in the series? Probably Memnoch the Devil.....
2) VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE! Okay, okay, okay, so it's a cheesy pen and paper RPG game, but it did spawn books, video games and a half decent comic book series. Vampire: The Masquerade created an entire universe, a complicated system of cults and clans, masters and servants. The vampires in the Masquerade range from sexy club scenesters and romantics to vicious psychopaths to sewer dwelling monsters and everything inbetween. It presented the vampire as a character more then just the sum of it's parts. In Vampire: The Masquerade, a vampire is a three dimensional character. The best part of the game was the division of Nature and Demeanor, creating a sence of duplicitythat made for interesting game development.
1) COUNT DUCKULA! It's a vegetarian vampire duck! He could teleport using a stormcloud and travel back in time! How can you not love it!
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